Thursday, March 18, 2004

everyman = artist

We are playwrights when we converse (writing scenes and dialogues as we speak to the other characters in our circles), costume designers when we dress ourselves (selecting cut, pattern and texture to best accommodate our character in context), painters when we decorate our home (choosing colors for our walls), authors when we text or email (because prose, no matter how badly spelled or truncated is still prose), art directors when we select things we like for the bedroom (inherently understanding how things juxtapose), singers in the shower, curators in front of the mini-display cases, filmakers and photographers with our digital cameras.

Isagani Cruz, one of Manila's foremost intellectuals and critics, wrote that art is the province of the common man, and that it is only the artist who institutionalizes it. The artist takes the experience and transforms it into something other people can read or view or feel - but art does not belong to the artist.